Collected Poems: 1991-2000

John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that showcases his mastery of the English language, is followed by seven complete books from the 1990s and twenty-first centuries, exploring his varied interests and obsessions. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, including "Hoboken," a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 840 pages
\n Publication date: 25 January 2018
\n Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
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After his spectacular early career, in which he became one of the best-loved and most controversial poets of his time, and his radical and productive middle years, John Ashbery continued effortlessly finding new directions in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, writing playfully, inventively. His language is exquisitely attuned to mundane reality, transforming it. Here in a single, substantial, authoritative, and helpfully annotated volume are seven complete books from this crucial period, starting with Flow Chart (1991), a tour de force that shows Ashbery's mastery of `the entire orchestral potential of the English language,' as Helen Vendler put it. It complements Ashbery's earlier Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, offering a vision of the collective `dream of everyday life that was our / beginning, and where we still live, out in the open, under clouds stacked up in a holding pattern / like pictures in a nineteenth-century museum.' The poems range across Ashbery's varied interests and obsessions - opera, film noir, French poetry, the visual arts. Everywhere is his boundless inventiveness, his pitch-perfect ear for American speech, his exuberant erudition. The book ends with twenty-six uncollected poems, among them `Hoboken', a collage that pillages Roget's Thesaurus, and much else.

\n Weight: 746g\n
Dimension: 201 x 128 x 38 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781784105259\n \n